Staff Correspondent
Port Blair, Mar 17: One more tourist today died at North Bay Island due to lack of first aid or any other medical care. According to reports available here the tourist Mr. Senthil Mariyappan from Chennai had come to Port Blair for a holiday with his wife.
The couple had gone to North Bay where Mr. Senthil went for Banana Ride while his wife went for snorkeling after which Mr. Senthil reportedly complained about chest pain and uneasiness.
Sensing danger, tour operators tried to shift the tourist to G B Pant hospital immediately but according to reports, the tourist died on the way. The 31 years old tourist had married nearly two years back and was working in an IT Company.
Following this, local tour operators and responsible citizens of Port Blair gathered together and made all arrangements to send the body to mainland but sadly till late evening nobody from Tourism Department came for extending any kind of help.
Earlier on November 23, 2012 a 53 years old Kolkata based tourist Mr. Subrata Guha Thakur had died at Jolly Bouy, on June 02 2012 another tourist Ayyanuthu Iyer Ramakrishnan from Chennai had died at North Bay Island and very recently, a software engineer from Infosys Hyderabad had also died at Havelock Island.
It seems that the tourism department has learnt no lesson from these all accidents. Atleast in three, out of these four cases, tourists had died just because first aid was not available at the tourist spots. This is high time for the tourism department to get up from slumber and do something to provide atleast first aid for tourists in tourist spots.
Even after many attempts Andaman Sheekha could not find the mobile number of the Director of Tourism Department for an official comment in this regard as no one was ready to share the mobile number, for reasons unknown.
What hurts more is that after such incidents no one from tourism department comes for any kind of help to send back the body of tourists to mainland, which is the most difficult and painful task.
“The Tourism Department must appoint a liaisoning officer for such cases so that victim tourist’s family and local people could send the body back to mainland without much trouble. These victims were neither our family member nor our guests but we have to leave our work for atleast two days to help the victim’s family. We do it on humanitarian ground, which should have been done by tourism department,” said an angry tour operator.
However, according to reports, the post mortem of the body will be carried out tomorrow at 6.00 am and the body will send back to Chennai in tomorrow’s flight.
Very sad … Tourist department please wake-up …